How Critical is a Data Backup and Disaster Recovery Plan to Your Business?

Your organization is running smoothly... a disaster happens. Whether this disaster is caused by an act of God, a hacker, or one of your own employees, you must be ready. Let's take a look at several statistics that show you just how imperative having a well strategized data backup and disaster recovery plan is.

We constantly stress the need for even our smallest clients to have a continuity plan. The bigger the business, the more comprehensive the plan has to be; if there are a lot of moving parts in your organization, you’ll have a lot of moving parts when it is hit with a data loss incident. We spend a lot of time talking about data loss and how it can negatively affect your organization, but we will never be able to stress enough just how big of an asset your data actually is. All the expense that you’ve paid out in man-hours and resources can be lost in an instant, so doing everything you can to protect that asset is extremely important. The truth is, that for the small business, losing data can be the end game.

Listed below are some of the surprising statistics; and, for each we’ll break down what it potentially means for your business.

Statistic #1: 75% of small businesses do not have a continuity policy
Say you operate a deli, or a hair salon, or a small boutique. You have two computers that you use and one of them is your point of sale system. Why would you need to have a business continuity plan in place? The answer is in the name: Continuity. You don’t want to go out of business if something were to happen that would cause you to close your doors for a few days, would you?

As far as data backup goes, here are some scenarios:

Your deli accepts credit card information through its dedicated point of sale system. The hardware on the system crashes...Now what? How awful would it look if you told your regular customers that their financial information was lost? Even if it wasn’t stolen, you have to imagine that your reputation would take a hit.

You run a small clothing boutique. One of your employees checks their email while they are doing inventory. They click on a link that infects your computer with malware. Can you let a simple mistake ruin your business?

A comprehensive data backup strategy will protect you from anything that can put your data at risk; from hardware failure to employee sabotage. As an integral part of an overall business continuity plan, data backup protects your organization’s data in case something terrible happens.

Statistic #2: Over half of companies have experienced a downtime event that was longer than a full workday sometime in the last five years.
Downtime is a business killer; during these periods, your business is not producing anything, nobody is making any sales, AND you are paying people to sit around and twiddle their thumbs. It will be no surprise to learn, then, that the reason so many businesses fail after a data loss incident, isn’t that they didn’t back up their data, it’s that they didn’t recover enough of it fast enough.

When we consult businesses, we stress the importance of redundancy. The BDR solution we offer has a network attached device that backs up data locally, but the device also pushes changes into the cloud, ensuring that data is stored in more than one place, and giving administrators peace of mind that if something terrible were to happen to their business, the data is safe.

Statistic #3: Nearly 77% of malware-compromised organizations in 2017 were hit by “fileless” malware.
Fileless malware? Now what?! Malware dissemination is getting much more sophisticated, and in the gaps of time where antivirus and firewalls haven't been able to react, people are having their data stolen and systems corrupted.

Fileless attack techniques have been around for a while. Essentially, the attacks using this technique don’t leave executable files behind, making it more difficult to ascertain where the malware came from, thus making it harder to remove. Some types of fileless techniques include:

• Registry-resistant: Attackers store malicious scripts in the registry to help them survive system reboots and make it difficult to remove.
• In-memory: Attackers utilize exploits and code-injection to load and execute malware straight from a system’s RAM.
• Living off the Land: By injecting malicious code into legitimate admin tools, an attacker can disseminate malware throughout a system without any warning at all.

As it relates to data backup, malware attacks can get ugly. Especially if they somehow make it onto the computing network and infect several endpoints simultaneously. By utilizing a powerful backup and recovery solution, you can eliminate the normal downtime that an organization incurs when their systems have to have maintenance performed on them. This is because the network-attached BDR device can act as a server until hardware is replaced or repaired.

To talk to one of our professional IT consultants directly about how much value a dynamic backup and disaster recovery solution can have for your business, call Macro Systems today at 703-359-9211.